Chapter 18: Love
The climb back up to the mangled pod was a silent, feverish scramble. Kord moved with a tectonic slowness that was pure control, Fred’s webbing-shrouded form held level against his broad chest. Trixie scrambled ahead, clearing debris from the entrance, her hands shaking not from fear now, but from a desperate, focused energy. The hideout’s interior was a tomb of shattered blue light and acrid smoke.
“The table,” Eli said, his voice hoarse. “Clear it.”
It was the same heavy, scarred worktable from the main chamber, now dusted with plaster and glass. Trixie’s breath hitched. She knew its surface intimately. She’d felt its cold press against her back months ago, after the ambush in Crystal Crevice. Fred had held her hand then, his face tight with a worry she’d mistakenly attributed to general team concern. Now, they were laying him on the same spot.
Kord lowered him with infinite care. The slugs, sensing the shift, hopped onto the table’s edge, forming a silent, anxious honor guard. Voltage’s crackles were subdued, sputtering. Scorch’s warmth had faded to a dull, worried glow.
Eli was already shrugging off his backpack, his movements brusque with contained panic. He unzipped a padded compartment and gently lifted out a small, leaf-green slug with a single, luminous eye. Doc. The weight of the moment settled on the little Medic slug as Eli placed him on Fred’s sternum.
Doc didn’t need instruction. He looked up at Fred’s still, pale face—the matted mullet, the dark bruise already blooming along his temple—and his big eye clouded with a profound sadness. He gave a soft, empathetic chirrup, then closed his eye.
The light that erupted wasn’t a flash. It was a slow build, a verdant, luminous sunrise emanating from the slug’s small form. It poured over Fred’s body, seeped into the fabric of his clothes, highlighting every cut, every scrape, the terrifying limpness of his hands. The gang watched, utterly still. The only sound was the faint drip of water from a ruptured pipe somewhere.
Trixie held her breath. Her ribs ached with it. This had to work. It had to. The image of him falling, the terrible silence after he’d landed, played on a loop behind her eyes. She realized, with a lurch, that her entire vision of the future—the gritty, hard-won, shared future she’d only just allowed herself to imagine—was balanced on this slab of wood, under this green light.
The glow intensified, throbbing like a heartbeat, then began to fade.
It receded slowly, like water draining from a basin, gathering back into Doc’s tiny form. The room returned to the dim, emergency-lit gloom.
Fred lay exactly as he had.
Unchanged. Unbreathing. A sculpture of broken potential.
Doc opened his eye. It was dull, exhausted. He looked at Eli and let out a weak, defeated whimper, a sound of profound apology. He’d done all he could. The damage was beyond his gifts.
The held breath in Trixie’s lungs turned to ice, then shattered.
“No.” The word was a whisper, torn from a place deeper than thought. She brought her hands to her mouth, fingers cold against her lips. “Please, no.”
The tears weren’t a wave; they were a sudden, total immersion. A silent convulsion wracked her frame. Eli was there instantly, his arms wrapping around her, pulling her tight against his shoulder. She didn’t sob; she shook, a silent earthquake of grief, her face buried in the familiar scent of his jacket. He held her, his own eyes squeezed shut, his jaw a hard line.
Kord took a step back, his massive head bowing. He placed a huge, gentle hand on Fred’s shoulder, a final, futile gesture. A low rumble escaped him, a sound of pure anguish.
Pronto, uncharacteristically quiet, wiped a grimy sleeve across his eyes. “He… he will be sung of in the deep-cavern halls,” he stammered, his voice thick. “A hero’s burial in the Crystal Catacombs. I shall… I shall compose the ode myself.”
It was the definitive word. Burial. The finality of it punched through the room.
Hope, that fragile, stubborn thing, extinguished.
And then, Fred gasped.
It wasn’t a dramatic, full-bodied heave. It was a shallow, ragged, desperate sound. A piece of machinery trying to turn over after a long, cold winter. His chest hitched, once, twice, then settled into a weak, arrhythmic rhythm.
Trixie jerked as if shocked. She tore herself from Eli, stumbling back to the table. Fred’s lips were parted. A faint mist formed on a piece of polished metal near his mouth, condensing with each scant, struggling exhale.
“He’s breathing,” Eli breathed, disbelief warring with a surge of wild, desperate relief. “Doc, you did it! He’s breathing!”
But Doc chirped again, anxious. He hadn’t done it. Not fully. Something was still terribly wrong.
Fred’s eyes flew open.
Trixie’s heart leaped. “Fred!”
He stared at the ceiling. Not with recognition, not with pain. With a vacant, animal terror. A low moan started in his throat, rising to a choked gurgle. His body tensed, not with purpose, but with a seizure-like rigidity. His left hand twitched, fingers clawing at the air.
“Fred, it’s me! It’s Trixie!” She grabbed his twitching hand, lacing her fingers with his. His skin was cold and damp. He didn’t squeeze back. His gaze skated over her face without seeing her.
“The brain,” Kord said, his voice gravelly with understanding. “The impact. Doc can heal bone and tissue, but not… not that.”
“What do we do?” Eli’s eyes were wide, darting from Fred’s terrified face to the medical kit on the wall.
“We stabilize him,” Kord said, moving into action. His grief was shelved, replaced by a focused, practical energy. “We keep him warm. We monitor his breathing. And we pray his mind finds its way back.”
The next hour was a meticulous, horrifying ballet. They worked around the slugs, who refused to leave their posts. Trixie stayed at Fred’s head, murmuring to him, telling him about the fight, about the machine he’d destroyed, about the taste of the victory he’d bought. His eyes would sometimes slow their frantic movement, focusing on her voice for a second before skittering away again, lost in some internal chaos.
Eli and Kord rigged a makeshift medical station, hooking up a bioluminescent fluid-drip from their stores. Pronto, seeking purpose, began quietly clearing the worst of the debris, casting furtive, worried glances at the table.
Finally, the seizures subsided into a fitful, twitching sleep. His breathing evened, but remained shallow. The color didn’t return to his face.
Exhaustion hit them all like a physical blow. They slumped in chairs dragged close to the table, a silent vigil under the broken lights.
“He came back,” Trixie said finally, her voice raw. She still held his hand. “That’s something.”
“It’s everything,” Eli corrected softly. He was watching Fred’s face, the flicker of movement beneath his eyelids. “He fought his way back. That’s who he is.” He looked at Trixie. “We just have to give him something to come back to.”
A soft chirp came from the bandolier slung over a nearby chair. It was Zero. The Frostcrawler, usually so reserved, was extending a tiny, frost-rimed feeler toward the table. Then Scorch. Then Hammer. One by one, Fred’s slugs began to emit quiet, pulsing glows—not their battle auras, but softer, rhythmic patterns. A slow, calm pulse from Zero. A warm, steady ember-glow from Scorch. A deep, resonant thrum from Bulk.
It was a language without words. A song of presence. A beacon.
Trixie felt a fresh tear trace a path through the grime on her cheek, but this one was different. It was warm.
Fred’s fingers, lying limp in hers, gave the faintest, almost imperceptible twitch.
Not a spasm. A flutter. Like something trying to signal from a great, dark depth.
Outside, the world was silent. The enemy was gone, for now. Inside, the real battle had just begun, fought not with blasters and velocimorphs, but with pulse-lights, whispered words, and the fragile, tenacious thread of a single, struggling breath. They had him back. Now they had to help him remember how to be Fred.
The slugs’ pulsed song continued through that first night, a soft bioluminescent harmony in the ruined dark. Trixie didn’t let go of his hand. She watched the slow, foreign rhythm of his breathing, each inhale a small victory, each exhale a reminder of the chasm inside him.
She was still there when the faint, moss-filtered glow of the cavern’s false dawn seeped through the cracked viewport. Her back ached. Her eyes were grit-filled stones.
“You need to sleep,” Eli said softly, placing a steaming mug near her elbow. It smelled of bitter root, not coffee.
“Later,” she said, the word automatic. Her thumb stroked the back of Fred’s knuckles, tracing the familiar callouses from his wrench and his blaster grip. They felt like him. The rest—the stillness, the silence—did not.
Doc tried again at midday. The green light washed over Fred, seeking, mending. It sealed the last of the abrasions on his cheek, smoothed the bruising around his temple into a faint yellow shadow. When the light faded, Fred’s physical shell was pristine, unmarred. He looked like he was sleeping after a hard day’s work at the forge.
His eyes opened. Empty.
A sound of pure anguish strangled itself in Trixie’s throat.
Trixie refused to leave Fred’s side. She couldn’t believe it. She just couldn’t.
The others rotated. Kord brought her food she barely touched, his usual booming voice lowered to a subterranean rumble of encouragement. Pronto tidied obsessively, presenting useless trinkets he claimed had “revitalizing aura.” Eli handled communications, his replies to concerned allies short, evasive.
She stayed. She talked to him. She told him about the repairs Kord was making to the pod’s structural supports, described the new scorch marks on the floor. She read technical schematics aloud, the dry language of gear ratios and slag compression a familiar liturgy. Sometimes, his eyes would track toward her voice. For a second, a flicker would surface—a faint tightening of his brow, a twitch at the corner of his mouth.
Her heart would seize. “Fred?”
Then it would vanish, slipping beneath the still surface like a stone, and his gaze would drift back to the middle distance, vacant and terrifying. It broke her heart every time he opened his eyes and looked at her, but couldn’t see her.
He was alive, and she was eternally grateful for that, but he was a shell. A body housing a fractured mind. The vibrant, focused intensity that was Fred Lawrence was gone, leaving behind a beautiful, breathing prison.
They tried everything. For a week, they tried everything.
Doc tried to heal him each day, but couldn’t. The little Medic would press himself to Fred’s forehead, glowing with concentrated effort, but it was like pouring water into a cracked cup. The structure couldn’t hold it.
Kord procured a pungent poultice from a deep-cave troll shaman, a sticky resin that smelled of burnt mushrooms and regret. It did nothing. Eli called in every favor, acquiring vials of crystal-clear "memory-water" from the Eastern Caverns and a buzzing, expensive neuro-stimulator from a black-market tech-dealer. The water might as well have been from their tap. The stimulator made Fred’s leg jerk involuntarily, a gruesome puppet dance, but his eyes remained dark.
Nothing worked.
Trixie’s hope, that stubborn little flame, guttered under the cold drip of failure. She started talking less. She just held his hand, watching the slow rise and fall of his chest, mapping the landscape of this stranger who wore Fred’s face.
Until one day, a week after the incident, Fred went into a coma.
It wasn’t dramatic. He didn’t close his eyes after some final, lucid moment. He just didn’t wake up. Morning light found his breathing deeper, slower, his features slack in a way that was different from sleep. More profound. More final.
“Fred?” Trixie whispered, squeezing his hand. “Time to wake up.”
Nothing. Not a twitch. Not a flicker behind the eyelids.
She called his name louder, her voice cracking. She shook his shoulder, gently at first, then with a frantic strength. “Fred! Hey! Come on, don’t do this!”
The panic was a cold flood in her veins. Eli and Kord rushed over. Doc pressed himself hard against Fred’s neck, glowing desperately. The slugs on the bandolier erupted in a discordant chorus of alarmed chirps and flashes.
But Fred was gone, sunk deeper than before. He just wouldn’t wake up.
Trixie was absolutely devastated. The last thread, the one tied to the faint twitches of his hand, the occasional track of his eyes, snapped. She made a small, wounded animal sound and backed away from the table, her hands flying to cover her mouth.
“He’s just resting deeper,” Eli said, moving to hug her, his own face pale with shock. “His brain, it’s… it’s consolidating. That’s a thing, right?”
She shoved him away, not roughly, but with a definite finality. “Don’t.” The word was shattered glass.
Kord put a massive hand on Eli’s arm, stopping him from following as she turned and fled, not out of the hideout, but down the short corridor to the small hangar where the gear was stored. It was dark, smelling of oil and cool stone. She slid down the wall beside a rack of discarded mecha-beast parts, drew her knees to her chest, and finally let the silence swallow her sobs.
Eli and the others tried to comfort her, but realised quickly that she needed to be alone. The man that she had just come to love could very well be dead.